~Dr M L Jat
India has moved from food scarcity to record harvests. The next leap is from volume to value and from food security to nutrition security, powered by climate-smart science, post-harvest value chains and the blend of modern innovation with traditional knowledge, with farmers’ net income as the true yardstick of success. Food is not merely the foundation of life; it is deeply linked to the social stability, economic strength, and human dignity of any nation.
Therefore, World Food Day is not just an occasion to reiterate our commitment to providing sufficient food, but also a time to reflect on how secure, nutritious, sustainable, and farmer-centric our food systems truly are.
The theme for 2026 “Innovate Today. Nourish Tomorrow”, points toward this shifting priority. This year’s FAO call to pair cutting-edge innovation with traditional knowledge and inclusive approaches resonates closely with India’s own agricultural journey. India’s agricultural journey is a remarkable story of transformation.
After independence, the country struggled with food grain shortages, low productivity, and heavy reliance on imports. Coordinated efforts in high-yielding seeds, irrigation, agricultural research, fertilizers, institutional credit, and price support gave birth to the Green Revolution. The result was not merely an increase in wheat and paddy production; India achieved food self-sufficiency and laid a strong foundation for its growth.
From a nation once dependent on food aid, India is today the world’s largest producer of milk and pulses and its largest rice exporter. Today, looking at agriculture solely through the lens of grain production is no longer enough. Agriculture is becoming a catalyst for nutrition, employment, entrepreneurship, value creation, and rural prosperity.
The Changing Face of Agricultural Growth India’s agricultural transformation can be broadly viewed in three phases. Between 1967 and 1995, the primary focus was on food self-sufficiency and grain production. From 1996 to 2014, agricultural diversification gained momentum alongside changing food demand and rising incomes.
Post-2015, resource efficiency, climate resilience, and farmers' income have emerged as critical goals alongside diversification. Evidence of this shift is clearly reflected in agricultural growth data, wherein a structural upward trend in agricultural momentum is revealed.
Average annual growth hovered at 2.71% during the 19671995 period and 2.98% between 1996 and 2014, before marking a significant acceleration to approximately 4.51% in the post2015 era. Currently too, India’s agricultural trajectory continues to reach new heights. Building on the record 357.73 million tonnes (MT) harvested in 2024–25, national food grain production for 2025–26 is estimated to hit an unprecedented milestone of 376.56 MT.
This is a robust 5.3% year-on-year growth propelled by record yields in rice, wheat, and maize. While these achievements are significant, the question today is not merely how much more we can produce. The real question is how much better we can produce with fewer resources, and how much we can increase farmers' incomes through that production.
Why Science Must Lead Agriculture’s Climate Paradigm Shift Escalating climate change, severe groundwater depletion, soil degradation, and planetary resource boundaries necessitate a fundamental shift in agricultural development. The next agricultural revolution cannot rely on resource intensity; its core mandate must be lower input requirements, reduced climate risk, higher resource-use efficiency, and enhanced farmer livelihoods. Here, national agricultural research systems play a decisive role.
The priority must shift toward developing resilient crop varieties capable of enduring compound climate stresses such as droughts, heatwaves, flooding, and emerging biosecurity threats, while optimizing water productivity and delivering higher nutritional density. Frontier technologies including genomics, gene editing, artificial intelligence, remote sensing, and precision digital agriculture, are accelerating this structural paradigm shift.
In 202526 alone, of the 386 new crop varieties released by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), 94% were climateresilient and 29% biofortified. Concurrently, ICAR expanded its intellectual property portfolio with 805 IP applications and strengthened technology transfer mechanisms across 36 national research institutes. This trajectory signals a profound realignment. Agricultural research is no longer defined solely by volumetric yield, but by its capacity to concurrently safeguard climate resilience and nutritional security.
The new equation is simple: more crop per drop, more nutrition per hectare, and more income per farmer. From Farm to Market, to Farm to Value A farmer’s prosperity cannot be achieved through production alone. Farmers will receive a fair price for their produce only when they become more effective participants across the entire value chain.
Hence, we must evolve our thinking from “farm to market; to farm to & A major portion of agricultural value is created outside the farm gate. This includes grading, processing, packaging, branding, storage, cold chain, transport, and export which are all critical links that add value to farm produce.
Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs), cooperatives, agricultural infrastructure, and digital markets can accelerate this shift. With nearly 86% of India’s land holdings small and marginal, collective action through FPOs is the most practical route for these farmers to capture value, while digital public infrastructure such as Agri Stack and e-NAM can connect them directly to buyers, credit and real-time market information.
The future of agriculture will be determined not just by what is harvested in the field, but by the value generated from that harvest. Realigning India’s Agricultural Paradigm from Food Security to Nutrition Security.